Nowadays, people can obtain various pieces of information when accessing web pages on the Internet. Each of the web pages is a structured document written in a structured language such as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) or Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language (XHTML). The web page is displayed for viewing on a display in software called a browser for the structured document. Japanese Patent No. 03588337 discusses a method for selecting and printing a region of a web page as an image. When the method is used, usually, a web page is displayed in a browser on a display, and a region in the displayed web page is selected by a user using a pointing device such as a mouse.
Conventionally, however, when a region of a web page displayed in a browser is selected in the browser, the selection is made only on an element-by-element basis in the structured document. In other words, a user cannot select a desired region such as a part of an image element or a part of a text element.